For Garth Greenan Gallery’s fourth Spotlight exhibition, the gallery will present three early works by Navajo artist Emmi Whitehorse. Painted in the 1980s while the artist was enrolled at University of New Mexico, and, later, while she lived in Connecticut, these astonishing paintings are emblematic of Whitehorse’s early practice. Two of the pieces belong to the artist’s Kin Nah Zin (Standing Ruins) series. Kin Nah Zin is the name of the region where Whitehorse’s family lived and tended sheep in the summer months while she was a child. The bright hues, fragmented planes, and subtly inflected color respond to Whitehorse’s adult memories of this high desert landscape: The sunlight reflecting off the surface of the harsh rocky landscape, the movement of clouds as they passed from west to east. Such qualities coalesce to form striking compositions of exceptional quality and power. 

“The early works in the 1980s & 90s are directly related to place. From the shape of the land, plants and sky to the weather rolling over it. We lived on the other side of Mt. Taylor, a sacred mountain that delineated the easternmost point of the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. As a child I would look across the desert towards this great mountain and imagine all the different trees and plants that grew there. They were impressed into my memory and inspired the first marks and colors which I expressed in my paintings.”

These works represent a decisive shift in Whitehorse’s practice, marking her transition away from the symbolic register of her earliest work toward the more expansive, fully abstract approach of her developed practice.

About the Artist

An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Emmi Whitehorse (b. 1957) is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her paintings—four examples of which appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale—feature atmospheric fields of diffuse and shifting color that teem with elemental forms. Meditative and slow, Whitehorse’s painting is rooted in the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, a concept connoting beauty, order, harmony, and balance. “My paintings tell the story of knowing land over time,” she says, “of being completely, microcosmically within a place.”

Emmi Whitehorse’s new diptych, Reseeding Chaco (2026), is currently on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, New York.